Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Guitar Anti-Hero? Led Zeppelin guitarist slams video games

This is amusing, particularly since I've written before about how music video games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band are contributing to a decline in musical talent (for the record, I'm a classically trained musician and a philosopher of technology).

Enter Jimmy Page, guitarist for Led Zeppelin, who commented recently "that he can't imagine that people are really learning anything significant about playing instruments by playing video games."

3 comments:

Jeff LaSala said...

I played Guitar Hero once, at a friend's house. (I own no console games.) It was...okay, mildly fun, and then only because I played a couple of songs I knew (Rush and Heart).

But from day 1 it struck me how much more fun and educational the game would be if only the plastic instruments emulated REAL instruments. They could make learning how to play such intruments much more fun!

But...they don't. At most, I guess you could learn about tempo.

Robert Velarde said...

Thanks, Jeff. To be fair, I realize the intent of the games is largely just to have fun, not provide lessons in guitar playing or music theory. But I think these sorts of games could be more educational and still be fun. Playing real instruments is a lot more fun, but it takes work.

Danny Wright said...

They do teach people to be faux guitar players, you know... kind of like, I'm not a real guitar player, but I do play one on my console.